“Me and Bobby McGee”: The story of the Janis Joplin, Kris Kristofferson song.

Before he was an outlaw-country pioneer and a movie star, and after he was a Rhodes scholar and a helicopter pilot for the U.S. Army, the jarringly handsome young man was a janitor in Nashville, for Columbia Records, where he picked up Bob Dylan’s empty coffee cups. (He avoided chatter with the superstar for fear of losing his job.) After that, in the employ of Petroleum Helicopters International, he flew workers to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. It was during such unsettled circumstances that Kris Kristofferson had written his latest song, the one that put him in the catbird seat. The “ great ride ,” he’d say, had begun. The composition was being covered as fast as contracts would allow. The up-and-comer’s words were in the mouths of giants: Roger Miller, Kenny Rogers, Gordon Lightfoot